[kevin_thibedeau]

Can someone explain why the new crop of datacenters are considered to be noisy?. I've been around the Wall Street datacenters in Jersey and they are basically the same as nondescript office buildings surrounded by a fence. The ones running on generators 24/7 are a problem but what is making the rest such an issue?

[ckozlowski]

I wrote this in another reply here, but from this article and others I've read on Space X's/Tesla's datacenters, it's the use of turbine generators that cause that enormous whine sound. (Note how similar it is to a jet engine.) I live in Ashburn, where we have datacenters all over the place. But none of them sound like this. At worst, we get a dull hum, much lower in volume, if the air handlers are working especially hard. But you need to be on top of them to hear that.

Ashburn has the infrastructure however. From what I'm reading, other places don't. So they bring in power on-site, and it seems to be much less regulated.

[foota]

Perhaps an un-fun fun fact if you're living near one of these, but Boom aerospace has pivoted to start selling turbines for data centers in addition to its normal business.

[ehnto]

Not sure they got to having a normal business yet. Hopefully they don't just pivot entirely to energy.

[KennyBlanken]

There are no turbine generators at the DC in the video and that's not what gas turbine power plants sound like. they're much higher pitched.

But yeah, the ones with the turbine generators are even louder and more shrill. The xAI DC in Memphis last year had thirty five portable gas turbine generators.

[K0balt]

That’s 35 jet engines operating at high power coming to a neighborhood near you. Sounds like fun.

[euroderf]

35 consumer drones delivering 35 chunks of metal.

[m4rtink]

These simple natural gas turbine generators are also massively inefficient - the same natural gas used in a combined cycle district heating plant would have its energy used much more efficiently, but here instead most of it ends up as waste heat, for the same amount of CO2 generated.

Not to mention the same natural gas could be used for chemical processes, like fertilizer production. You know, helping make the stuff we eat to survive.

Last I checked, you can't eat AI.

[Schiendelman]

Usually I think they're trying to get the infrastructure, but because we've created a permitting nightmare across the US, they can't get the permits for anything they want, so they're stuck with mobile generation that doesn't require much permitting.

Edit: I don't think it SHOULD be this way, but downvoting me doesn't change that, only organizing for changes does.

[mrtesthah]

Using unpermitted turbine generators[1] is just as illegal as violating the other permits they’d need to obtain for grid access. Doing illegal acts is a choice on their part — no one is forcing them to do that. There is no inherent right to private profit at the expense of the social good.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...

[Schiendelman]

That article's author says it's illegal. Neither the EPA nor a judge have made any judgments about Colossus generators being illegal (in fact, it doesn't sound like the EPA has made any enforcement actions at all, to date).

The article is about the EPA issuing a new rule (see the link behind "declared" in the article you linked to) closing the "nonroad engine" loophole, which the author of the article asserts makes those turbines illegal. The same new rule created a new subcategory allowing turbines for up to 24 months with streamlined compliance, and left a path open to EPA certification for turbines under Title II.

But the Colossus 1 turbines were already permitted by the time that article was published. At least 2/3 of the Colossus 2 turbines are permitted already too.

In the next month, there'll be a preliminary injunction hearing for the NAACP's lawsuit, but the DOD and DOJ both oppose the suit, so we'll see.

The companies doing this in Texas aren't even using that nonroad engine loophole - they're just getting Texas' minor permits. The EPA said in June that they're not going to create national rules, and instead defer to states. So you're seeing Virginia tighten regulation, and Texas loosen it.

So frankly, no, none of it is illegal. I think you're right that it should be, but that's a different problem, and not one you can help fix by claiming it is. If you want all this to be cleaner, go fix permitting for fixed clean energy generation, because it's a disaster.

[KennyBlanken]

Edit: the noise at many of these DCs are also "portable" natural gas turbines, intended for use as emergency power or temporary power at large events. But companies like xAI are using them to back-door build large power plants. xAI's memphis DC has 30+ turbines running non-stop and xAI never filed any paperwork or received any permits related to them.

AI DCs use enormous amounts of power (and thus generate enormous amounts of heat) compared to "traditional" DCs. We're talking hundreds of megawatts, sometimes gigawatts. 1GW DCs have been popping up already.

OpenAI is planning a 10GW facility in Ohio that will need its own natural gas power plant. A 10GW natural gas power plant is massive. Currently the largest NG combined-cycle power plant in the US is about 3-4GW and comprises several combined units. Typical size of a NG plant is more like 500MW.

To put that into scale: a very large Manhattan skyscraper is in the 10-20MW range, so OpenAI is planning to use as much electricity as, well, all of Manhattan's skyscrapers and then some.

Since NG turbines are at best 60% efficient, the plant itself will generate ~6 GW worth of waste heat (remember: combined cycle, so they've already extracted as much heat as they can for power.)

10GW of heat is the same amount of energy as the amount of heat from solar radiation hitting roughly 10 square miles of the earth's surface.

It's also the difference between evaporative coolers which don't need as high static pressure, and dry coolers which need to force air through more dense air-liquid heat exchangers and also have to move more air.

Where people have pushed back on water consumption, rates have been raised (water deparments are increasingly going to nonlinear billing scales which charge people more per unit when they use more) or water just isn't available - datacenter operators have had to switch to "dry" cooling where coolant or refrigerant passes through a giant radiator.

Much less effective than evaporation. So you need to move a lot more air, and it also has to be done through a radiator, which probably has higher static pressure than an evaporative cooling tower.

[Levitating]

In this case it has nothing to do with AI

> these are largely crypto mining rigs making this noise

[Gigachad]

Yeah but with 10GW we can generate more AI videos of politicians to trick boomers. It's worth destroying everything for that.

[alightsoul]

A lot of hyperscale data centers, often built for ai, are built cheaply so there is no CRAC air conditioner nor any other air conditioners using refrigerant (direct expansion air conditioners) nor air or water cooled chillers. As air enters the building, it passes though electrostatic filters to remove dust, then through evaporative coolers which spray water to cool the air and then directly into the cold aisles in the data hall. Then The hot aisles are vented directly to the atmosphere through the roof. The server fans are very loud and can be heard outside.

[xnx]

AI datacenters are an entirely different beast than traditional "computers in a warehouse" datacenters.

It's like the difference between and idyllic family farm with a few chickens and pigs to a factory farm with thousands of pigs jammed under one roof.

[protocolture]

Datacenters are fine, its gas turbines making the noise.

Whats crazy tho is people repeating this as if its true of all datacenters.

Whats even crazier is fringe australian politicians WHO LIVE NEAR DATA CENTERS importing this and claiming all datacenters in australia are noisy (because some terminally online seps were complaining about it) without so much as going down to their local and testing the hypothesis.

[sidewndr46]

What I find interesting is that having lived in the southeast US for decades now, there is never any shortage of a story where someone buys a house near a race track. Not long after that, they complain that the race track is loud for several days in the week. Generally what follows is lots of posturing by local politicians and judges. Inevitably the race track shuts down within a year or so, usually because it isn't worth the legal battle.

Yet somehow data centers that apparently make awful noises 24/7, local lawmakers are suspiciously unable to do anything about.

[ryandrake]

Same with regional airports. People who knowingly bought houses near a critical small local airport can band together and get it shut down because it's loud, but somehow doing it to a data center is a bridge too far??

[ElevenLathe]

A race track is a normal business trying to make money, so its operators rationally fold rather than almost certainly losing money even if they win in court.

An AI (or crypto mining) datacenter is fundamentally a financial fraud (or most charitably, in Mr. Greenspan's immortal phrasing, a result of "irrational exuberance") that has taken physical form. Nothing about it is rational, and their operators are happy to waste millions fighting even doomed legal battles to keep the music playing so they don't have to grab a chair.

[protocolture]

>An AI (or crypto mining) datacenter is fundamentally a financial fraud (or most charitably, in Mr. Greenspan's immortal phrasing, a result of "irrational exuberance") that has taken physical form.

I really dislike the modern trend of trying to recategorise things when you dont like them.

A datacenter is in the business of providing power and rackspace to a customer. The customer is in the business of providing compute to AI users or a crypto network. That you are vociferously opposed to those pursuits does not invalidate them in any way.

>and their operators are happy to waste millions fighting even doomed legal battles to keep the music playing so they don't have to grab a chair.

What does that even mean.

[winrid]

I think in this case it's HVAC?

[ImPostingOnHN]

Over time, improvements have been made in compute density, because more compute density means more money.

Higher compute density means higher thermal density, which means more powerful cooling is needed.

Server cooling solutions follow a management triple constraint: cheap, effective, quiet, pick up to 2.

Because loudness does not incur additional costs (due to negative externalities), "quiet" is the point of the triangle which gets most often sacrificed.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Blockchain has higher compute density. Nobody was bitching when the miners built out their datacenters.

[dgacmu]

The mining datacenters beat the AI datacenters to the punch on that, actually:

https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/bitcoin-mining-noise-driv...

[alightsoul]

Since they don't need a lot of bandwidth they prefer to build out in the middle of nowhere. Ai data centers and data centers In general can't do that cheaply because they need higher bandwidth so they need to be closer to fiber optic lines which are often close to communities